Arthur Bispo do Rosário: lunacy, art and second-order cybernetics

Abstract

Arthur Bispo do Rosário created separate realities inspired by the objects of his surroundings. He intended to summon up everything and report to God. The objects he found or got from other inmates were waste of the Juliano Moreira Colony where he lived in seclusion because the lords of order categorised him as mentally ill. Bispo began by unravelling the uniforms of his seafaring days and Colony clothing and with the threads he wove maps and banners. He collected old shoes, empty milk bags, gears, tools, toys, cutlery, bottles, mugs to shape into powerful amalgams of odd aesthetic narrative. As pieces of the Colony waste were given to Bispo by other inmates and as he turned the scraps into art, his creative strength was offered to the hospital’s population and now to museums and art galleries. The observation of this cycle of stunning wonder between Bispo and his fellow inmates suggests the view of unravelling second-order cybernetic processes. Simple things of the world turned into art got new significance in the eyes of the observers. Their poor world became thrilled in delight. As an inmate of a psychiatric ward in Rio de Janeiro, he never stopped his intense and endless work building an inventory of embroidery, assemblages and objects deemed to present the Lord. His work captured the aesthetic sensibility of the Colony population who started viewing the common things of the world redeemed by Bispo as sacred uncaged tokens with divine destination. A virtuous unending cycle of human sensibility and creativity. As observers, we make the distinction of evolving processes in the realm of second-order cybernetics.